PART FOUR of my review, as continued from here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/1013-2/
All my reviews of Bowen novels will be linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/elizabeth-bowens-novels/
All my links of Bowen stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My gestalt real-time review of THE HOTEL will continue to be conducted in the comment stream below:
21. VALLEY
Donatello
“The disappearance of sunlight from the flowers deadened the colours of them; from being like flames, spontaneous, they became tawdry and adventitious; bougainvillæa traced a heavy pattern on the walls, geraniums were the flat stale pink of old confectionery, and the mimosa blotched the faces of the hills as monotone and pale as mustard.”
Ironic that such entropy or emptiness of natural light (contrasting with the blinding lights in the reader’s eyes from the previous chapter), that Ronald, now alone (‘out of Donatello’ like Eva Trout’s a sculpted Jeremy?) after having encountered three local girls and a man near a gate (“Their eyes had licked him up and down like the eyes of the American lady at Württemberg, who had compared him to a Donatello,…”), and then he meets (by chance?) Sydney sitting on a rock in an ‘empty’ valley, expecting her fiancé (? ) Milton to arrive — Ronald having already passed along a river in possibly one of the most important of Bowen’s passages in her whole canon…
“The river had once been expansive and impetuous, it had carried some of the hills along with it and flowed widely; at some points it had taken up the whole floor of the valley, leaping past the foot of the rocks hilariously or, dividing, made a long string of lemon-shaped islands. Now its wide bed lay parched, a petrified torrent up which Ronald, taking some pleasure in the performance, walked painfully with a sharp, continuous, loudly-echoed clattering together of stones. The river was young no longer; it had made an end of its variations and detours and had worn away for itself a very deep channel down which it flowed swiftly, and with a sinister effect of purpose; steel-smooth, impenetrable to the eye of Ronald, to whom it was no longer a companion. They should have known one another centuries before.”
Ronald leaning back on his elbow sits on the same rock as Sydney, flinging stones into the valley along where Milton might be coming, ”…leaning back on his elbow he subjected her profile, covertly, to a perplexed and grieved scrutiny. […] ‘Then why doesn’t he come?’ he said, relapsing on to his elbow again.”
Sydney says: “I said the third valley to the right, behind the convent. He may have miscounted. Or he may not want to come.’”
Please recall the counting of hotel balconies earlier in this novel.
We eavesdrop on this crucial meeting between the respective neuro-diversities of Sydney and Ronald. A catalyst of what is about to happen, if I remember the rest of this novel correctly….
“‘I’m afraid I don’t like these people at all. I cannot see why they should ever have been born, or why, at least, they should need to go on being born over and over again so frequently.’
‘I dare say,’ said Ronald, ‘they enrich the soil.’
‘I dare say,’ said Sydney.
[…] ‘What a lot of energy is wasted,’ she observed, ‘in replacing one lot of people by another exactly the same.’”
Ironically, Ronald “in no way resembled his mother. Mrs Kerr, at least, had not cared to replace herself.”
You can’t make it up!
And indeed, tellingly with or after or before her “little boy’s grin”, Sydney, still expecting Milton to arrive, “did not look at her watch, but knew that she had reached that psychological moment, that turning-point of any long wait when the likelihood of a friend’s arrival instead of increasing with the advance of time begins to diminish.”
That Zeno’s Paradox of hope’s expectation. But, as in Sydney’s case, dread’s expectation, too!
You see, Sydney had also earlier seen the same four locals at the gate!
Another reference to KÔR in Valley above – “a general allusion to the ‘not impossible She’…”
22. RATHER AFRAID
“A stone which somebody might have thrown came bounding down from the heights and struck the river bed;…”
We now join Milton slowly approaching the arranged meeting point, no doubt counting the valleys, and it is as if the reader is that ‘somebody’ (later called “Some One” in this chapter’s text) who picks up one of Ronald’s thrown stones, thus disrupting or uncrystallising or unprinting what may otherwise have already been set in stone in this whole chapter’s text that still needs to be unstoned…
He had not yet posted the letters (still a bomb in his pocket) to his family about the engagement to Sydney. I was to gather later Sydney had already sent off similar letters to her own people. But maybe, I was wrong thus to infer.
“They had mentioned Mrs Kerr frequently, but there had never been more than a little head of her stamped as it were for circulation on a conversational coin.”
We flounder in all manner of Sydney and Milton half-said, half-left, undescribed motions and outside influences and imposed strictures from their own various Proustian selves within…all with the passion of the fleeting moment, a fearless faith in their own fiction, and the competing slowth of Zeno’s Paradox…
“The momentary impacts of colour and smells and light in his senses that had built up the place for him would be forgotten, only the sum of them, that he might have received in an idle half-day, would remain. A thousand hours superimposed on each other would melt into one; a thousand that had in turn been unique, coloured differently each from the others by mood or circumstance.
‘Will she ever,’ he wondered, ‘be so complete to me; not a succession of moments but one? Will these evenings, mornings, lights, memories, shadows, half-apprehensions, glimpses, ever fall away or run together and be merged in the whole of her?”
He had, now it seems, earlier found her — before such moments started — standing with Ronald in this terrain of future ghosts…
“Milton noticed that the two were like each other; they had the same build and the same carriage and might have been brother and sister – to, he believed, the advantage of both.”
“There was pathos for him in this ghost of a contact, well-timed in this drained-out, colourless ghost of a day. Angrily, with a sense of destruction, he put up his hands and shouted.”
Later or earlier…
“‘James, I won’t let you be happy if you mean to surround me with silences – sinister silences that bulge like a bubble and never quite burst.’
He laughed. ‘You don’t like the ineffable.’
‘Nothing’s ineffable.’”
Roland as “benevolent third”, who slips off stage, leaving them with their own fleeting moments and lasting slowth…
“The evening had an ache about it, a hush of timelessness, and Milton wondered if he should forget this, too.”
No elbows, but there is the cracking of nuts. A moment of Bowen’s Anti-Natalism…
“‘But we’re going to live it. Any life would look bad from the brink; if we had to make the decision we’d probably never be.’”
“They were both blotted out, himself and herself were forgotten: he came to a brink.
Time carried him on again after he could not say how long a cessation of being.”
The boy Curdie in the sky’s doorway. I feel I am up there, too, not understanding anything, but understanding everything better than the characters themselves do. Only Bowen understands it all perfectly, though, and she has already gone through that doorway…
“She went ahead of him, her bright scarf flickered ahead like a flame through the olives.”
I note the more positive or sarcastic form of ‘shadowy third’ with Roland as ‘benevolent third’ — as if checked with an Onoto : oh not two!
23. NEXT CORNER
Tessa, Sydney’s sponsor, we understood, now manages the Sydney-Milton syndrome (Milton as an Angel mixing the anti of Lucifer with the plus of God?) — that syndrome as the optimum of what has happened, the Anti-Anti-Natalism to compete with Bowen as the grim freeholder of this neat anti-novel itself…
“She told him how wonderful it would be to her to see Sydney in a home of her own and with children,…”
The decimal point movement of time…
“Tessa thought that it would be so nice for James to get to know Sydney’s friend Mrs Kerr really well before they went back to England, so she planned a surprise on her own account, hired a car for the afternoon and invited Mrs Kerr and Milton to drive with herself and Sydney up to a village high in the hills; from which, she had heard, one could look right over a ridge and see a quite unbelievable number of other hills whose similarity to one another made one surprised at the size of the world.”
This is the next corner or the next rock to turn and slowly climb round as well as speed round at a symbolic ‘Hanging Rock’ picnic (was Joan Lindsay inspired by ‘The Hotel’?), as they face twists and turns in a fiat with perhaps an uncertain driver who has perhaps taken over from Bowen … and this chapter is so crucial to Boweneers, we need to quote liberally from it….
“Tessa every now and then whispered to Sydney that Mrs Kerr and James seemed to be making such friends — didn’t they? — and getting on excellently. ‘I was sure they would, they are both so clever. I think we’ll keep a little farther behind them. Sydney, they may be wanting to talk about you.’”
“I should never feel the same, you know, about any picture in Florence; they are so known.’ The air of the church was stale with the incense of years, the breath of long-dead congregations had not been disturbed; it was cold with the exhalations of stone for ever in darkness. Mrs Kerr wandered off by herself and stood in abstraction in front of the altar;…”
The crux approaches with all manner of Bowen word bomb and bone thrown at us, corner by corner, elbow by elbow, dream by co-vivid dream amid the miasma and shadows of religion…
“‘I can’t stand this air any longer, I shall be sick,’ exclaimed Sydney suddenly, and after a last glance towards the altar pushed aside the leather curtain on the door and went out hurriedly. The church stood on the rim of hill between the known and unknown landscapes, a melancholy outpost, and it would be pleasant for Sydney to wait outside, though not, Milton seemed to think, to wait alone: he went out after her. Tessa sat down by herself at the end of the church and presently, after one or two uncertain glances round her, knelt.”
A humming balance as in Hanging Rock, still hanging, still imminent as well as immanent…
“The village, heaped up high in its walls, achieved another of those miracles of balance; it was the same as many other villages that they had explored, but as it was for the afternoon Tessa’s they exclaimed at its charm and oddity. Inside it was half dark, noisome and complicated, with whistles of cold air spouting at them through archway, down staircases dark enough to be blind and from cellar doors. They entered the pâtisserie with misgivings,…”
“…there was only one view. In her memory one gave place to another kaleidoscopically: there was only one at a time.”
“Tessa in placid deprecation of the laws of change. A lump rose in her throat as she too saw Mrs Kerr’s hand lying on Sydney’s. Partings were terrible. Ought she to move away gently with Milton to the other end of the terrace?”
This even approaches the shallowness of a story as if written by Man instead of Woman? But it was the latter who offered the apple, I say! That Impossible She.
“Sydney took no notice of what was being said; she did not seem as though she had heard. She stood between Tessa and Mrs Kerr as inanimate and objective as a young girl in a story told by a man, incapable of a thought or a feeling that was not attributed to her, with no personality of her own outside their three projections upon her: Milton’s fiancée, Tessa’s young cousin, Mrs Kerr’s protégée, lately her friend.”
Dropping that plummet again…
“It’s not like motoring at all, it’s more like dropping.’ ‘Perhaps ——’”
As the crux or crash impends, as if forever….
“We musn’t go over too quickly,’ she thought, ‘there must be time to say something.’ Under the rug her hand found out Mrs Kerr’s sleeve and rested there ever so lightly.”
The next corner, the Houses of those Russians again now being rebuilt, timber across the sharp bend with a potential drop to lucid Lucifer’s Hell, threatening a drop, horses seemingly illl-treated…
“‘Sydney … has this given you rather a shock?’ She was plainly what people describe as ‘upset’. ‘They’ve no right to bring those things up here,’ he angrily cried. ‘Well, they must build their houses, my dear.’”
“Above, in this unnatural, endless prolongation of the daylight she for the first time felt life sharply, life as keen as death to bite upon the consciousness, pressed inexorably upon her, held to her throat like a knife. Dazed by a realization of their import she stared at her hands, at her body, at the hills round her.”
The crux is crucially there or crashing….
“Sydney saw Milton, scarlet and also shouting, trying to stop this and being swept aside amicably as one who knew nothing of the country, of timber or the management of horses.”
“Tessa, only too glad to be out of the Fiat, was trotting up and down like a little bear in her fur coat. No one, evidently, could have been sorrier for the poor horses than Mrs Kerr, but she was trying to restrain Milton from further interference because he ran a momentary danger of being elbowed over the edge of the road. As Sydney approached, the situation was further complicated by a short log working loose from the pile, slipping down sideways and getting locked between the far-apart spokes of the wheel.
‘It’s all so damned silly!’ cried Milton exasperatedly. The crisis brought out in him at the expense of his rationality all that was latently English. Mrs Kerr shrugged her shoulders and smiled.” [my italic]
Mrs K as an agent of the Devil in Milton.
But…even more crucially…
“He turned to find Sydney there, pale, at his elbow and Mrs Kerr gone.” [my italic]
There you have it. The crux, the cross, the crossing point of two prayers in a new bony Bonnyville…
“He understood by some odd intuition; but kept her watching him for a moment or two while he listened intently to the clamour below, the isolated exclamation, the voices. ‘What’s quite impossible, Sydney? What do you mean?’ ‘Our marriage.’ ‘Oh!’ he said quietly. ‘Oh!’”
The Ghost of the next corner as the now hung rock…
“They went up the hill painfully, as though it were steeper, and turned the next corner, which gave her back a kind of echo, a ghost of that early idea of deliverance.”
“I think we have been asleep here; you know in a dream how quickly and lightly shapes move, they have no weight, nothing offers them any resistance.”
“The tide of shadow had risen at last and engulfed them, drawing the hills together and making the valley seem to float up to them, spreading a film of silence in which the clamour from below was diffused.”
“‘Why is it so much more tiring to sit still in something that doesn’t move?’ Sydney climbed silently in and sat between them. By the time they had been able to pass the wagon, drawn back farther down into a bay of the road, she felt that the evening was already over, that they had been home for a long time, that all this had happened a year ago and only by some delay of the memory still seemed to concern them.”
“Then all night long she was climbing up the endless road again, corner by corner, to an empty town at the top.”
“Corner by corner” … elbow by elbow.
Towards a township of versions of the empty Villa.
Cross-referenced with a closing scene in EVA TROUT: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/13/eva-trout-by-elizabeth-bowen/#comment-23634
24. KINDNESS
An ironic title to the first half of this novel’s post-crux coda or de-brief, a resolution by the literary opiates of what it says, and thinks, so as to release the tension of the triangulation of its four coordinates — Mrs K, Ronald K, Sydney Warren and James Milton….
First Mrs K’s appeal to her son to accompany the disappointed (ridiculed? ) Milton away on on the same train and not avoid talking with him when travelling with him away from the subtle spoken boardgame or mimed pageant of the book…
“The appeal stretched out and closed upon Ronald’s unwillingness, tentacle after shadowy tentacle; he got up and walked round Mrs Kerr’s room, uneasily moving his shoulders, writhing mentally like the Laocöon and feeling himself constricted at every point.”
This is pure literature as the expansion of its breath and filling any gaps left with the endless sound of “silences applied tenderly, like a swab to a wound; silences held up, like a shield, square and blank; silences poked across at him gingerly; the silences of Miss Pym, of Colonel Duperrier, of Eileen Lawrence.”
Ronald thinks the decoupling of this book’s deflated synergy between Sydney and Milton is a a fuss about nothing.
“Ronald could not understand why two people who had come to the place unaware of each other, in perfect integrity and without the intention of seeking a mate, should not be allowed to remain there untroubled now that a transitory notion of marrying one another had been abandoned. Or if they were due to depart, why had they to depart processionally in a long train of Spirits Pitiful; regrets, remorses, condolences, noisy emotions given the licence of carnival? Mrs Bellamy was ‘taking away’ Sydney (who now had to be bundled about like a lay figure and spoken of like the unillustrious dead) to a place on the French Riviera, and later to England.”
Burning passions beneath the innocent words.
Mrs K —
“Her face by that movement emerged from red dusk and was shown to her son like a picture, lit up: a face lying rather wearily back among cushions, full of lucidity and gentleness; less beautiful at the moment than burning in on his consciousness its essential quality, mental or spiritual, that he could not define. Ronald wondered again if this was what he would learn to call love, or whether he would ever experience any other: this feeling of being burnt in upon that left no room for desire.
[…]
Her eyes took him in, very tiny, and round him the room and the world with its tiny people drawn by their hundreds of tides.
[…]
‘I don’t begin to be lonely just yet – here’s such a charming letter, an invitation, from those Emmerys in Paris.’
‘Oh, Margot Emmery …?’
‘Yes, Margot. I am so fond of her. So you, my dear, can run away to Sicily.’
She tugged gently at a fold of her tea-gown on which he happened to be sitting and swept him away from her with a gesture, as though he were a little boy again and she were sending him off to bed.
[…]
Mrs Kerr gently stirred on the sofa, the loud ticking of the travelling-clock at her elbow became suddenly audible.”
Until the final hidden accusations within the otherwise spoken kindness from Sydney returning Mrs K’s books, a kindness upon Mrs K. And Mrs K who once loved or still loves her and is cut to the quick by such cutting kindness. Just as she had thought she was the one controlling the pieces on the board, even harnessing a sexual love for a son equated to sending him off to bed like a little boy, as still she is wont to do. Harnessing that love as an alchemy for Sapphism. The same sort of love she felt for Sydney to assuage loneliness. All undone by the sound of the clock by her elbow dissipating the silences.
“Mrs Kerr, catching her breath at the sound of the latch, began repeating her name again in such a tone of desolation and loneliness that Ronald, driven out against something intolerable, rushed through the curtains.”
Now, he is on that once counted balcony smoking, after burning, and “doubling his elbows under him”…
earlier, he had said this ….
‘I’ll be getting along,’ said Ronald to Sydney.
‘Oh no, don’t go.’
But the room seemed too small for three people.”
No room left even for shadowy thirds, I guess.
“….he still saw everywhere his mother’s head in the circle of light from the reading-lamp printed everywhere on the darkness.”
One of those would-be All-Saints controlled as print or stain by Bowen, still wanting to buy a window for a church to exorcise her sins.
25. GOING AWAY
Going Away or already Gone Away?
“…a shandrydan came round about three o’clock to drive Mr Milton and Ronald down to the Genoa train. It appeared about half an hour before it had been ordered, and the limp horse in a bonnet, looking as if it had been propped up on its legs precariously,…”
One of those poor horses from that next corner? That bend or elbow in the road.
A coda’s coda, with the originating Pym-Fitzgerald ‘quarrel’ summoning the aeronautic darts of a new game at the end, as the deflated synergies curve through the air like elements of a dream of the Rip Van Winkle paradox told to a Vicar like Milton from Bowen’s then future story GONE AWAY?
Double doors opened to release a grand piano…upon leaving this world of The Hotel…
“Poor Milton!” torn from the lips of one of the erstwhile quarrellers, still in a friction of a relationship. Yet Sydney and Tessa had not yet gone away! They were there to say goodbye. Something strangely perfect about that. Even Mrs K on her balcony waving? Read it and see.
Time for another picnic, I guess, a catharsis with more trivial games that one day would be up here in the future on social media or in pre-covid pubs…
“The Lee-Mittisons, among others, are so sorry. You know they are getting up Progressive Games?”
“The Hotel from up here was as small as a doll’s house;…”
Aickman eat your elbow out! Or any that are left.
****
A great novel that surely should be on every syllabus, on all lips, pre-Lapsarian as well as post-. The God and Devil in us all.
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